Various sheet bending brakes are known and used for bending and cutting metal or vinyl sheet work-pieces such as those used for siding on homes and buildings in the industry today. A typical sheet bending brake functions by clamping a work piece between clamping members and using a hinged bending arm to bend the work-piece about the clamping member.
A sheet bending brake disclosed in the United States Publication No. 2002/0124621 (the '0124621 publication) shows a guide mechanism reacting between a clamping member and a pivoting arm for moving the pivoting arm between the open position and the clamped position of the sheet bending brake. The guide mechanism includes a detent between the open and the clamped positions for providing an intermediate clamping position for adjusting the position of and precisely aligning the work piece. However, the clamping member disclosed in the '0124621 publication is not self-adjustable, but instead must be tuned as before.
Hence, the sheet bending brake disclosed in the '0124621 publication, although an improvement, did not overcome the inadequacies that characterize sheet bending brakes in the area of a need to manually tune the overall mechanism to accurately perform work functions on the work-piece as the sheet metal brake was used over a period of time. Accordingly, one of the opportunities of continuous development and research is the area of a more advanced design of a pivot link that may eliminate the need of manual adjustment and provide greater accuracy in using the sheet metal brake over time.